Your smartphone apps are handy for you, not for low-wage workers - Think Atheist2015-03-03T23:32:36Zhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/forum/topics/your-smartphone-apps-are-handy-for-you-not-for-low-wage-workers?commentId=1982180%3AComment%3A1286323&xg_source=activity&feed=yes&xn_auth=noJust saw this video and it ma…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-04-01:1982180:Comment:12870822013-04-01T08:23:18.716ZH3xxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/H3xx
<p>Just saw this video and it makes my case. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0ilMx7k7mso?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0"></iframe>
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<p>Just saw this video and it makes my case. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0ilMx7k7mso?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</p> Any tax havens that lie outsi…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-04-01:1982180:Comment:12873162013-04-01T08:09:20.499ZH3xxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/H3xx
<p>Any tax havens that lie outside of the country, because that's literally money walking out the door. In house tax loopholes like donating to charity could be acceptable, provided that a cap be placed on how low tax rates can be sunk, and making sure that companies and rich people are not in anyway involved in the administration of the charities they donate to. It doesn't count if you're basically donating to yourself.</p>
<p>Any tax havens that lie outside of the country, because that's literally money walking out the door. In house tax loopholes like donating to charity could be acceptable, provided that a cap be placed on how low tax rates can be sunk, and making sure that companies and rich people are not in anyway involved in the administration of the charities they donate to. It doesn't count if you're basically donating to yourself.</p> Sorry for writing a book, but…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-04-01:1982180:Comment:12873122013-04-01T07:48:35.115ZH3xxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/H3xx
<p>Sorry for writing a book, but government is a bit of a passion of mine, and this is one aspect of government that grinds on my nerves. I do hope you take the time to read it.</p>
<p>It isn't technology, It's greed. And Jobs aren't being killed, they are being controlled, like the diamond market. Jobs come out of the woodwork when progress and productivity are the main driving factors in companies, but when the main goal of a company is to maximize profits, then jobs suffer. After all, you…</p>
<p>Sorry for writing a book, but government is a bit of a passion of mine, and this is one aspect of government that grinds on my nerves. I do hope you take the time to read it.</p>
<p>It isn't technology, It's greed. And Jobs aren't being killed, they are being controlled, like the diamond market. Jobs come out of the woodwork when progress and productivity are the main driving factors in companies, but when the main goal of a company is to maximize profits, then jobs suffer. After all, you can't squeeze every last penny out of your company if your workers have comfortable shifts/ workloads and healthy wages.</p>
<p>Companies have lost site of their purpose in society. You don't go into the grocery business primarily to make money. Your first responsibility as a grocery company is to provide food for your community at reasonable prices. Just in America over the last thirty to forty years, workloads have increased and wages have remained relatively the same, the minimum wage increasing by a quarter here, a penny there. Jobs have been shaved off and outsourced to create a deranged form of job competition. You have to work hard to find a job, and even harder to keep it. And of course you have a choice. A <span dir="auto">Hobson's choice</span>. You can either work at any job they give you, or you can starve to death. As long as there's a choice, it's not slavery.</p>
<p>Even though it is. Foxconn is just another company employing wage slaves, people who work there because they have no real choice. In fact, nearly every item you own was likely made with slave labor, and the source is greed.</p>
<p>We live in a world where companies and corporations make upwards to 150-200% profits every year by doing things to cut costs as low as humanly possible, from intentionally reducing product quality, ignoring health and safety regulations, actually reducing their infrastructure int the case of service providers, and hiring people who work for wages so low they barely buy enough food for their families, let alone pay any other debts like utilities and rent. All for the sake of Profit.</p>
<p>What can we do to fix this? I had the idea of instituting a Carrot and Stick system of regulation Many companies rely on tax payer subsidies. Right now, these subsidies are paid annually, no matter what. When BP, Shell, or Exxon spill toxic oil into our water supply, should the tax payers give them any money? Hell no! When they sell barrels of oil to hedge funds who ship the barrels to a warehouse, out of the way to artificially inflate demand, should the tax payers give them anything? NO! If anything they need a great big fine, or have their charter revoked. But if they were to expand their business to include geothermal plants, solar and wind farms, to provide cheap energy, or develop an gasoline formula that is easily atomized inside internal combustion engines to increase fuel economy and reduce emissions, then should the tax payers give them any money? Sure. They did something for the benefit of the community on the whole.</p>
<p>This system can be tailored to fit any industry, and should be used to not only punish and discourage unproductive, and non-progressive behavior, but encourage good behavior. The system could take into account worker wages and benefits, workloads and shift times, as well as environmental and infrastructure activities as well. Hardware companies like Foxconn, Gigabyte, Kingston and the like should be punished for hiring wage slaves, and encouraged to invest in assembly robotics, environmentally friendly plastics and conductive components, and healthy working environments. Service providers should be judged by how much they increase their infrastructure to include rural areas, how many jobs they keep INSIDE the country, and how much flexibility they provide their customer base.</p>
<p>This last one I would say could be optional to the system, because it could be considered a little too socialist for sensitive capitalist: I would institute a maximum profit cap. Profits for large private entities can not exceed 100%, that is to say, the amount of money you make after your expenses cannot exceed your expenses. If you spend 100 million dollars this year, you can make back that 100 million, plus up to 100 million in profit. Everything after that must be used, either in expanding your business infrastructure, donating to charity or giving employee bonuses. Anything not used will be collected in taxes for use to benefit the country.</p>
<p>All private entities that make above certain amount annually would be subject to the carrot and stick system. Small business would only be subject to normal regulations.</p> Which tax havens would you li…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12868842013-03-31T23:38:27.177ZArcushttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/Arcus
<p>Which tax havens would you like to see closed, and how would you do it?</p>
<p>Which tax havens would you like to see closed, and how would you do it?</p> Technology always has had thi…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12868812013-03-31T23:35:11.630ZArcushttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/Arcus
<p>Technology always has had this impact, and there will always be so called sunset industries. The car killed off the farrier, the telephone displaced the telegraph operator, and the retail stores made the mom'n'pop all but disappear. One way to look at it is that through the optics of creative destruction, as defined by Schumpeter, whereby new innovations ensure that the established players in a market cannot achieve a monopoly. While such paradigm shifts often hurt individuals, they do…</p>
<p>Technology always has had this impact, and there will always be so called sunset industries. The car killed off the farrier, the telephone displaced the telegraph operator, and the retail stores made the mom'n'pop all but disappear. One way to look at it is that through the optics of creative destruction, as defined by Schumpeter, whereby new innovations ensure that the established players in a market cannot achieve a monopoly. While such paradigm shifts often hurt individuals, they do profit society as a whole and ensure a smoothly operating market economy.</p>
<p>The way to "fix" it would be to nationalize the economy and slow down the rate of technological progress. There would be less gain to society, but at least misery would be more equally distributed.</p> If other companies expect us…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12868142013-03-31T16:44:41.167ZUnseenhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/Unseen
<p><span><em><strong>If other companies expect us to pay for their services, they better do everything and anything they can to make those services a thousand times more reliable, more durable and more functionally than Goolgle's servic</strong></em>es.</span></p>
<p><span>I'm fairly sure that if a company does something so much better than Google that people will pay for it Google will snatch it up and it will be free. Isn't that what's been happening. I could site Google's antispam filter,…</span></p>
<p><span><em><strong>If other companies expect us to pay for their services, they better do everything and anything they can to make those services a thousand times more reliable, more durable and more functionally than Goolgle's servic</strong></em>es.</span></p>
<p><span>I'm fairly sure that if a company does something so much better than Google that people will pay for it Google will snatch it up and it will be free. Isn't that what's been happening. I could site Google's antispam filter, which is as close to magic as anything in the real world can be. I'm pretty sure they bought it from someone who otherwise would have been selling it.</span></p>
<p><span>As for taxes, while it seems unfair that a company like Carnival Cruise Lines pays just .06% and GE pays none, but I wonder if taxation actually works at all anyway. Who ends up paying a well-run company's taxes in the end? Isn't it their customers? And yet, what is the alternative? A government has to have money to operate.</span></p> This piece is from techdirt i…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12867262013-03-31T16:33:46.388ZMorgan Matthewhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/morgan
<p>This piece is from <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120602/02140019181/not-only-can-you-compete-with-free-you-have-to-if-you-dont-want-your-business-overrun-piracy.shtml" target="_blank">techdirt</a> is talking about file sharing but I feel this can also apply to hardware quality as well.</p>
<blockquote><p>Not only <i>can</i> you compete with free, <i>you <b>must</b> compete with free</i> or you're going to lose out. If you don't offer a legitimate alternative, people will flock…</p>
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<p>This piece is from <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120602/02140019181/not-only-can-you-compete-with-free-you-have-to-if-you-dont-want-your-business-overrun-piracy.shtml" target="_blank">techdirt</a> is talking about file sharing but I feel this can also apply to hardware quality as well.</p>
<blockquote><p>Not only <i>can</i> you compete with free, <i>you <b>must</b> compete with free</i> or you're going to lose out. If you don't offer a legitimate alternative, people will flock to the illegitimate ones. Yes, some people will always infringe, but over and over again we see how legitimate services pull people away from file sharing and towards paying -- if they provide enough value at a reasonable price.</p>
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<p>This is exactly what apple has done on a fantastic level, "If they provide enough value at a reasonable price." I would agree with you about macs. I have grown up with a mac and out of the 25 years or so I have been using them only one had a hardware problem that was easily fixed.</p>
<p>Also I would like to mention a fantastic point from one of the <a href="http://megagames.com/news/super-meat-boy-creator-drm-causes-more-losses-piracy" target="_blank">creators of super meat boy</a> when it comes to downloading things for free and sums up exactly what my first quote from techdirt says.</p>
<blockquote><p><cite>“I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times,”</cite> he wrote. <cite>“... As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.”</cite></p>
<p>People who pirate videogames may or may not buy those games if they couldn’t pirate them, but there is no actual way to calculate that lost revenue, Refenes argued. <cite>“It is impossible to know with certainty the intentions of people. With the SimCity fiasco and several companies trying to find new ways to combat piracy and stating piracy has negatively affected their bottom line I wonder if they’ve taken the time to accurately try to determine what their losses are due to piracy.”</cite></p>
<p>Refenes affirmed that retail stores such as Kmart are able to calculate their losses precisely because their stock consists of physical items that can counted and valuated. But <cite>“in the digital world, you don’t have a set inventory. Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost. [... ] <strong>Digital inventory has no value</strong>. Your company isn’t worth an infinite amount because you have infinite copies of your game. As such, calculating worth and loss based on infinite inventory is impossible.”</cite></p>
<p><cite>“You cannot, with any accuracy, state that because your game was pirated 300 times you lost 300 sales. You cannot prove even one lost sale because there is no evidence to state that any one person who pirated your game would have bought your game if piracy did not exist.”</cite></p>
<p>Refenes then questioned the logicality of using expensive DRM solutions to reduce the intangible losses caused by piracy. <cite>“You spend $X on research for your new DRM method that will prevent people from stealing your game. That $X is a line item in accounting that can be quantified. Can you then say “This $X we put into research for our DRM gained us back $Y in sales”? There is no way to calculate this because it is not possible to quantify the intentions of a person. Also, there’s no way of accurately determining which customers would have stolen the game had there not been DRM.”</cite></p>
<p>In addition to the R&amp;D costs required to develop new and more effective DRM solutions, those solutions usually lead to direct and quantifiable losses due to refunds and loss of customers. <cite>“I’d take any amount of pirates over one return due to disappointment any day,”</cite> affirmed Refense.</p>
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<p>I want to write more but I have to go for the day. Good discussions so far.</p> Excellent points Matthew and…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12868062013-03-31T15:40:38.839ZNerdy Keithhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/keith
<p>Excellent points Matthew and very important to be raised. Unfortunately things will not go back to the way they used to be its just a simple fact of reality. </p>
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<p>But I think you can compete with free. When considering to acquire a product, price is not everything. Quality is. I myself use the most expensive computer money can buy, an Apple iMac (it has served me well after 7 years its still running very well). Now I could have purchased a Dell Laptop for much cheaper. But I…</p>
<p>Excellent points Matthew and very important to be raised. Unfortunately things will not go back to the way they used to be its just a simple fact of reality. </p>
<p></p>
<p>But I think you can compete with free. When considering to acquire a product, price is not everything. Quality is. I myself use the most expensive computer money can buy, an Apple iMac (it has served me well after 7 years its still running very well). Now I could have purchased a Dell Laptop for much cheaper. But I didn't buy this product for price, I bought it for reliability, durability and functionality. The same goes for the services Google is offering. If other companies expect us to pay for their services, they better do everything and anything they can to make those services a thousand times more reliable, more durable and more functionally than Goolgle's services. Sometimes the free option is not the best option. And if something goes wrong with it, do we have the right to complain? In my opinion I wouldn't say no. And I'm not saying this would be easy, its not; incredibly hard I would argue. </p>
<p>Now I'm sorry that the government is cutting all these services that smaller companies supply. The only thing that can be done about that is to give the government a reason to why it is economically worthwhile for them to be spared. </p>
<p>And yes, its unfair, its harsh and in many case heartbreaking. But the reality here is, we are in a global recession still and tough calls are going to have to be made. Industries will die, jobs will be cut, taxes will go up, wages will decrease etc. </p>
<p>But I do very much agree with your stance of Google pay so little taxes. This is indeed a very serious flaw with the economy; the rich should be paying more tax and not less. This is an issue the government needs to be pressured about. </p> I wonder if this huge trend t…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12868022013-03-31T15:16:53.365ZUnseenhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/Unseen
<p>I wonder if this huge trend toward more efficiency and more and more things for free, if the "job" of most people in the future is going to be being unemployed? and is all of this making some form of socialism a pending necessity? I don't see how capitalism can support a majority of the workforce if things keep going the way they are.</p>
<p>As it is, one of the reasons the job numbers aren't going up is that many of the jobs lost in the downturn will never come back. Why? Businesses (a)…</p>
<p>I wonder if this huge trend toward more efficiency and more and more things for free, if the "job" of most people in the future is going to be being unemployed? and is all of this making some form of socialism a pending necessity? I don't see how capitalism can support a majority of the workforce if things keep going the way they are.</p>
<p>As it is, one of the reasons the job numbers aren't going up is that many of the jobs lost in the downturn will never come back. Why? Businesses (a) worked hard on efficiency and succeeded in streamlining their processes and (b) they are working the workers they have harder. While paying overtime now and then or even regularly is expensive, it's less expensive than taking on another employee.</p> I know it might sound harsh a…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-03-31:1982180:Comment:12864852013-03-31T15:10:54.281ZNerdy Keithhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/keith
<p>I know it might sound harsh and I really feel for these people, but there always night courses or even online courses to get a better qualification then a better job.</p>
<p>In these though economical times we all just need to do everything we can to get ahead. </p>
<p>I know it might sound harsh and I really feel for these people, but there always night courses or even online courses to get a better qualification then a better job.</p>
<p>In these though economical times we all just need to do everything we can to get ahead. </p>